Communications Revolution

Historians and social scientists have identified a series of communications revolutions associated with the advent, first, of writing; then, of printing; then, of electronic transmissions (telegraph and radio); and, most recently, of computers and the Internet. This entry will consider the communications revolution unleashed by the printing press. How did the spread of printing shape legal thought and practice in the sixteenththrough eighteenth-century Anglo-American world? Its effects were extensive and varied, though skeptics properly ask how one can disaggregate its influence from other factors to assess the magnitude of its impact.